Kate Hamer - The Girl in the Red Coat

Dorothy wipes her smile away with the tea towel she’s been using as a serviette and the smile comes off onto the white cloth in a red mess.

‘No, child. You see there really is no room.’

‘Couldn’t she have a nightlight? A little candle maybe? It would be a light in her darkness,’ Grandad says.

‘Would that help? Do you think that would help you, child?’ Dorothy asks.

And I say I suppose so even though I don’t think really it will help at all. Not with the flickering shadows that a candle makes leaping about. I even think it might make things worse. But Dorothy’s already up and going through one of the kitchen drawers and looking.

‘Here, I knew we had one.’ She holds up a candle in its little metal tin. It’s the same as the ones me and Mum sometimes put along both sides of the garden path at home when we have visitors. We light them all at once so the visitors can see their way to the house. But we use hundreds of them to do this and Dorothy is only holding up one.

‘Perfect,’ says Grandad. ‘Just the thing.’ And he helps himself to more beer.

‘Time to say goodnight, Carmel.’ Dorothy says this quickly. Perhaps she realises I was going to ask about changing where I sleep again. I sigh and try to pretend to myself that a little candle is going to make a big difference and how cosy it’s going to feel now in that great big room.

She lights the candle then puts it in a china pot. ‘Come, child. I’ll tuck you in and say goodnight and see to it that you are as snug as a bug. Say goodnight to your grandfather.’

I say goodnight and he turns his cheek towards me. ‘A goodnight kiss?’

I’m not sure if I want to kiss him goodnight. But I do anyway. I sort of touch my lips onto his cheek and it feels very hard and solid there and it makes me think of the skin of pigs that hang up — stiff and dead — in the butcher’s shop.

‘Night night, sweetheart,’ he says, then gives a little burp.

I follow Dorothy up the stairs, dragging on my new shoes, because I want to put off going to bed as long as possible. In the corridor the flame in Dorothy’s hand shines through her skin and blood so there’s a big red hand floating up. Her shadow in a long skirt is on the wall. I look back and see my shadow, following behind, with my puffy shadow skirt sticking out. We both look like the paper puppets now and I wonder what story we’d be telling if we were.

I change into my new nightie by crouching on the other side of the bed and Dorothy tucks me in and puts the candle on the table next to me.

‘There, my dear, dear child. Doesn’t that make everything better?’

I’m about to say, ‘No, not really,’ but I realise there wouldn’t be much point. I say, ‘Yes, Dorothy,’ and she smoothes my hair back onto my pillow and goes away.

When I can’t hear her any more it begins. The shadows that the candle makes dance around the room and the dark places look like black holes waiting to eat me up. Every time I spend five minutes in this room it seems to come alive. It wakes up because I’m there and it’s worse than ever tonight. There’s shuffling and rustling all around. Then I hear quick footsteps running across the floor and I can’t stand it any more. I’m so frightened it feels like my insides are freezing. So I pick up the candle with one hand and get hold of my blankets by the corners in the other and run down the corridor dragging them until I’m at the staircase with the light shining up it. I leave the blankets and take the candle and go back to my bedroom quickly to get my pillow. Then I carefully put the tea light on a post which is flat on top. I sort out my pillow and blankets to make a bed at the top of the stairs. I have some blankets above and some underneath and I crawl into the bed I’ve made. It feels a lot better there even if it is hard underneath.

Courage, Carmel. Courage.

I turn my back on my bedroom. All that muttering and shuffling can get along by itself, I’m not going to have anything to do with it. I put my face so some light can shine onto it.

Downstairs I can hear Dorothy and Grandad’s voices rising and falling, rising and falling. Except after a while it’s only Grandad’s voice and Dorothy has gone quiet. Or when she does say something it’s very small and flat. I close my eyes and think of home to make me feel better. I make pictures of it flash up in my head: the mugs hanging up on hooks over the sink; our two toothbrushes in a glass in the bathroom; the moon shining huge over the rooftop; the red bucket by the back door; the fire making crinkly noises in winter as a log burns.

Mum in one of her flowery tops. Daisies. She’s hanging up a wooden sign we just bought, it says: THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME, and when she’s finished she dusts her hands off and says, ‘What d’you think, Carmel?’ and her eyes are shining out their lovely blue lights and I jump up and down and shout, ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,’ and she laughs.

I’m thinking of these things so hard I hardly notice at first Grandad’s voice has got louder and louder. When I do realise I open my eyes wide and hold my breath listening, stretching out my ears. Grandad sounds strange, like he’s in pain, or upset and angry. I can’t help hearing now he’s so loud, though I can’t understand what he’s shouting.

‘I had to do it, Dorothy. I had to. I was compelled, how can I make you understand that? She’s the one. The one, the one. You need to stop talking to me now. Stop your fearfulness. Be told. I had no choice in the matter. If I explained for a hundred years you still wouldn’t understand.’

Then everything goes quiet.

DAY 7

‘They’re here.’ Maria was looking out of the window. ‘Beth, it’s your parents, they’ve arrived.’

I peered out of the window and I could see my dad trying to open the door of the pearl-grey Jaguar. Two or three press people still turned up sporadically and now a photographer was flashing his camera through the car window.

‘Remember,’ said Maria. ‘If we tell them about the sighting, they mustn’t in any circumstances talk to the press. The last thing we want is a journo putting a spanner in the works. The information’s very vague.’

A woman had walked into a police station somewhere in the Midlands. She’d been out with her dog and seen the figure of a girl in red looking out of a window. She couldn’t remember which street. They were going to retrace her steps.

This was one sighting of the many. Each time they told me not to get my hopes up — I don’t think they even told me about them all. Leads to me were silver wires that could reach out to where she was. I imagined us both tugging, one on either end, so we could feel each other’s vibrations. They sent convulsions of excitement and anxiety through my body. It was like this now — I was in a state of high alert.

‘I’ll tell them — but they won’t talk to anyone. They’re not that type.’

Maria breathed out. ‘Good.’

I looked out of the window again and a slim woman dressed in beige with hair carefully curled close to her head was coming up the path. It had been years since I’d seen her and she’d aged.

I ran to the door and as I wrenched it open I heard a sound coming from me. ‘Mum, mum, mum’ — the sound that starts with a pressing together of the lips and rounds the mouth in one convulsive seizure. I felt as if ancient cords were working my mouth independently into that shape.

My father finally came through the gate — the angle of his small, pointing beard on display, cross and harassed. ‘No,’ I heard him say, his voice carrying, tight and clipped. ‘No. Get away from me.’

My mother’s awkward embrace smelled of her familiar cool metallic perfume. Over her shoulder I looked into my father’s face, set grim and folded.